The passing of a State’s Lady

She has been largely out of the spotlight since retiring, though I can’t picture Jeane Kirkpatrick retiring.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a political science professor whose support for Ronald Reagan conservatism catapulted her into the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has died at 80. She was the first woman to hold the post.

Initially a liberal Democrat, Kirkpatrick championed human rights, opposed Soviet Union communism and supported Israel.

“She defended the cause of freedom at a pivotal time in world history,” President Bush said Friday. “Jeane’s powerful intellect helped America win the Cold War.”

Kirkpatrick’s son, Stuart, said she died Thursday at her home in Bethesda, Md., where she was under hospice care. The cause of death was not immediately known. U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton asked for a moment of silence for her at a meeting of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. in New York.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan praised “her commitment to an effective United Nations” and said Kirkpatrick was “always ardent and often provocative.”

That’s right, she ardently wanted the world to be a better place, and provoked the U.N. to be what it should be. In his book “The U.N. Exposed“, Fox Newsman Eric Shawn says this:

Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick blames the U.N. for alllowing America’s ideological opponents to reach the highest levels of influence within the world body. She has suggested creating “a community of democracies which will be at least as strong as the community of dictatorships, which so effectively dominate so many U.N. activities.” As of 2005, the group Freedom House counted eighty-nine democracies as U.N. members, leaving 101 tyrannies, dictatorships, and oligarchies to run the place.

What clarity and intellect she brought to the world stage. We need another Jeane Kirkpatrick. May she rest in peace.